• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

MUSIC AS A OUR METHOD SECOND LANGUAGE LITTLE KIDS ROCK PEDAGOGY by David Wish A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I went into teaching for the same reason that so many people are called to the profession. I believe in kids, in their amazing potential and that the future lies with them. By becoming a teacher, I hoped to make a difference in children’s lives and, in so doing, make my own modest contribution to a better world for us all. The ten years I spent in the classroom were richly reward- ing and only strengthened these beliefs. Since the founding of Little Kids Rock, the media has often noted that I developed the pedagogy that guides our teachers while working as a first-grade, ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. This is true. However, a more informative statement would be that I developed this new methodology precisely because I was an ESL teacher. In the following article I explain how my formal training as an ESL teacher and the informal musical training I receive as a youth outside of the public school system lead me to the creation of a new, hybrid methodology that I call “Music As A Second Language.” As with any pedagogy, “Music As A Second Language” is a tool for your teaching tool-belt, a spice for your instruc- tional skillet. Please season your classes with it to suit your taste. My only hope is that you will find it useful as a means of bringing the transformational gift of music into your students’ lives. With my first ever guitar class at our first ever concert back in 1996. For More Information Please Visit www.littlekidsrock.org 3 Music as a Second Language & The Modern Band Movement – Little Kids Rock Teacher Manual Little Kids Rock approaches music as if it were a lan- guage, a second language. Why a second language? Because no one is born into a family where music is the primary language. Like spoken language, music can express the full range OUR METHOD of human emotions and does so by using its own dis- tinct grammar, meter and vocabulary. Like language, it has a both a ‘spoken’ and a written form. There is certainly nothing new about likening music to a language. Poets, writers and authors have been doing so for some time now… “Music is the universal language of mankind.” ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the se- cret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” ~Kahlil Gibran “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.” ~Victor Hugo “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.” -Thomas Carlyle MANY PEOPLE SAY, ‘MUSIC Is a language,’ BUT IT IS SELDOM taught as one.” – VICTOR WOOTEN, Bass VIRTUOSO Victor Wooten at a Little Kids Rock School 4 Likening music to language is more than just an ar- tistic flourish. The renowned and brilliant music educator, Dr. Shinichi Suzuki had a language-based epiphany as he lamented the elitist nature of music education in his native Japan and how it prevented so many children from becoming music makers. Suzuki marveled at the fact that virtually every child in Japan mastered the complex and challenging Japa- nese language by the tender age of five or six. He considered this commonplace occurrence a seminal cognitive accomplishment. If they could do this, he OUR METHOD reasoned, why then couldn’t they master the language Shinichi Suzuki of music since it was likely even easier to do than learning to speak their native language? He believed this to be true for children the world over. If they could master the their native language or mother tongue, they could certainly master the language of music. ART EXISTS FOR THE HU- Speaking at a festival in 1958, Dr. Suzuki succinctly MAN SPECIES. I THINK summarized his feelings about the connection between THAT ALL OF THE PEOPLE language and music and how it impacted his method- WHO LOVE ART, THOSE ology which he referred to as “Talent Education.” He Who teach art… all of YOU SHOULD BURN WITH said that he had: THE OBLIGATION TO SAVE THE WORLD.” “…realized that all children in the world show their splendid capacities by speaking and understanding – Shinichi Suzuki their mother language, thus displaying the original power of the human mind. Is it not probable that this mother language method holds the key to hu- man development? Talent Education has applied this method to the teaching of music: children, taken without previous aptitude or intelligence test of any kind, have almost without exception made great progress. This is not to say that everyone can reach the same level of achievement. However, each indi- vidual can certainly achieve the equivalent of his language proficiently in other fields.” Suzuki was moved by the connection between lan- guage and music and was convinced that people’s ability to master the complexities of speech was proof positive that all people had an innately musical nature. He employed some language-oriented techniques in his methodology (playing by ear, imitation) but did not take the analogy as far as we believe it can be taken. For More Information Please Visit www.littlekidsrock.org 5 Music as a Second Language & The Modern Band Movement – Little Kids Rock Teacher Manual TAKING “MUSIC AS A LANGUAGE” FURTHER… To explore how learning music might be akin to learn- ing language it is worth asking a simple question: “How is it that we all learn our native language in the first place?” Happily, linguists have studied this exten- sively and have a clear picture of how it all happens. OUR METHOD HOW WE ACQUIRE LANGUAGE Do you remember learning to talk as an infant? Prob- ably not. That is because the process of speaking hap- pens naturally and subconsciously for us. Here are the predictable stages that we all go through on the road to speaking: 1) Listening or “Pre-Production” (birth - 8 mos.) We all begin life as a quivering, raw and inexperi- enced bundle of nerves. We can make noise to be sure (see figure A at right) and we do so at great volume at times. However, none of these primal wails or random body noises (ever burped a baby?) constitutes a true WAAAAAHH!!! building block of language. At this point in our devel- opment we have only one linguistic skill…we can listen. Infants spend their time listening to the language go- ing on all around them and begin absorbing its sounds fig. A – Listening all the while. We typically listen for six to eight months to all the chatter going on around us. Infants begin to speak by simply listening to the people around them. BA? 2) Speech Approximation (8 months - 2 yrs.) We leave the listening stage when we begin trying to imitate the sounds of the language that we hear all around us. Parents delight as their babies start to babble and to use “baby talk.” This babbling is an ap- proximation of true speech. What sound like “nonsen- sical” syllables are actually sounds derived from the language that the baby is trying to speak. As babies babble, adults babble back, completing the approxi- BA! mation of a conversation (and making the adults look pretty silly at the same time)! fig. B – Approximation 6 3) Speech Emergence (2-3 years) Many parents can remember the exact day and time that marked their own child’s first word. Why? Be- cause it is such an exciting event! We know intuitively that this marks a new stage for the child and also we know where the whole thing is headed. Upon hearing that earth-shattering utterance (wheth- er it be ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ or ‘ball’ or ‘baby’), parents are likely to shout, “Eureka! She/he is talking!” That sounds a lot better than shouting, “She/he just entered fig. C – Emergence the ‘Speech emergence’ stage of language acquisition!” OUR METHOD However, that is precisely what happens when chil- dren start using single words. After a while the single-words are strung together in multiple word strings like, “Mama, milk” or “Me go on.” At this point the parents are likely to say “She/he is speaking in sentences!” That sounds better than say- ing, “Wow!! Sally just crossed the threshold into a new stage of language acquisition know as ‘Intermediate Fluency’!” “Mama, milk?” 4) Intermediate Fluency (2.5 - 4 years) During this stage of language development, children That’s not a begin stringing words together in increasingly sophis- Mama, milk! sentence! ticated ways and use language to communicate an expanding range of ideas, emotions and needs. Despite the fact that the child’s speech may be replete with grammatical errors, adults generally focus on the I know, try meaning of the child’s speech, recognize them for their using a verb! communicative value and are likely to offer much direct correction of speech errors. For example, look at the highly unlikely dialog at right (figure D). Wait, would fig. D – it help if I Intermediate Why does the dialog at right feel so “off”? Why do wrote it on Fluency we feel uncomfortable for the child and perhaps feel paper? annoyed by the adult? We understand what the child means and that is the purpose of language: commu- nication. This fictitious adult is belaboring points that are meaningless to the kid. Can’t she just give the kid a break and give her some milk? For More Information Please Visit www.littlekidsrock.org 7 Music as a Second Language & The Modern Band Movement – Little Kids Rock Teacher Manual 5) Fluency (3-5 years) During this stage of language development, children have developed what is commonly referred to as “na- tive-like” proficiency.

Load more

  42

Copy Link